Salaric

Tony Hart who used to have a children’s programme showing you art techniques and the like has died. I used to watch this programme religiously and feel that I should pay tribute as I’m still using some of the techniques he showed us.

The Wiggly Pets also owe their existance to the presance of two things in my childhood – Tony Hart’s character Morph and his friend, and The Trap Door animation series. I loved the concept of plasticine animation and used to sit and make things out of it for ages as a child – whole roast dinners, characters to eat the dinner, china tea sets, furniture, you name it!

When I was a teenager my dad found fimo which is the consistancy of plasticine and then I found it in different colours and I was away (as anyone who’s read the blog for a while will know!). But the route to even realising I could make things, especially characterisations came from those two programmes.

With that in mind I thought I should honour his memory with this post.

These lovely Japanese stickers and two panels were given to my little girl by a friend. I just love the cartoony shapes and balloon writing style of the characters. There were lots of people and then pink helicopters and the like which my little girl simply adored.

She gave me the purple panel as it’s my favourite colour and she had the pink. These in themselves were little works of art as far as I’m concerned with blossom, a river and a cityscape.

We stuck on numerous stickers and then I stuck them to the fridge.

Here is the url as promised:

http://lovemomiji.com/

Warning: it’s got little animations of the stickers and I sort of got hooked and was on the site for ages 🙂

My daughter was invited to a friend from pre-school’s party. It was his fourth birthday so I thought: what sort of card would he like?

I was going to get my daughter to make him something but she was playing in the garden so I decided to make it myself.

I used:

• One piece of blue mounting card slightly bigger than A4
• 3D dungaree trousers with rattly bits in the centre panel
• Nursery building block sticker, slightly raised
• 3D red car sticker
• A black felt tip

I folded the mounting card in half and then in half again to make the card shape. I then arranged the trousers, blocks and car so they sort of zig zaged up the page.

I then took the black felt tip and in clear loopy writing wrote, “Happy Birthday James” zig zagging inbetween the 3D stickers. The card looked very unbalanced in the top right though so I decided to draw a steam train with James as the engine’s name. I then speckled the card with five point stars – each star is drawn in one fluid movement. It took me a while when I was a schoolchild to work out how to draw those stars! It’s best to do a few practices on a scrap piece of paper to get into the star drawing groove I find.

I got this big box of Christmas Craft from The Works discount bookshop in Stroud. It cost me £3.99, which was reduced from about £7. It was full of coloured pom poms of various sizes, pipe cleaners in lots of colours including metallic ones, foam shapes, glitter pens, green and red lolly sticks, and ‘fashion cord’, PVA glue, plus some goggly eyes (these had red and green irises which was a bit weird).

I made some examples of this that you could make out of the pack and then handed over about one and a half big craft boxes minus the glitter pens to my Scout troop to play with. The glitter pens do not dry quickly enough to be used in a Scout troop. They also had the leftovers of the Big Spooky Craft Box from Halloween.

Here are what they produced! Apologies for the poor quality of the photos, I forgot the camera so had to rely on my phone to take the pictures with.

Christmas mobile:

He bent a star out of a silver metallic pipe cleaner, twisted a fluffy red and a fluffy white pipe cleaner together and bent it into a candy cane. For the other two were a foam cut-out Christmas tree and a yellow and gold pom pom. He tied each of these shapes to the lolly stick cross using some of the fashion cord, which was transparent plastic with sliver specks in it. I made the lolly stick cross for him out of two lolly sticks and pipe cleaners. I twisted the pipe cleaners around the middle of the two lolly sticks where I had overlapped them.

Three tiered snowman:

One of them just stuck three pom poms together in a row, starting with a large red pom pom for the base of the snowman, then a medium white pom pom and for the head a small white pom pom. He wrapped pipe cleaners around the joins to make it look neater and stuck on some goggly eyes. He then decided he wanted to make a halo for it which he did by bending one of the metallic gold pipe cleaners into a loop. The excess pipe cleaner he used to make it ‘hover’ about the snowman’s head.

Christmas tree in crisis:

Being impatient for the PVA glue to dry and seeing that I had ‘tied’ my green pom poms onto the lolly stick with pipe cleaner tinsel, one of the Scouts decided to do the same. He liked the effect so much though that he decided that the tree should just be a decoration made out of interlocking pipe cleaners giving it a surreal 70’s sci-fi egg look.

Candy canes:

One of the girls twisted red and white fluffy pipe cleaners together to get the candy cane effect and then cut the resulting twist into four. She then shaped them into little hooks. She really enjoyed doing this and so decided she would make some out of other colours as well. We had some left over stripy pipe cleaners from Halloween and she chose these to twist together.

Pipe cleaner Christmas tree:

One of the girls twisted a pipe cleaner into a Christmas tree shape and then decorated it with more pipe cleaners – generally the metallic type – as tinsel.

Surreal mobile:

One of the boys made this surreal mobile by twisting a red and a green fluffy pipe cleaner together to produce a twist effect; he then looped this to make a circle. Then he made a lolly stick cross in the way I had shown them to and weaved the circle onto this. This gave a fantastically strong frame to work with and was very neatly done. He then made bizarre but cute little creatures from the pom poms, foam shapes and goggly eyes. He then used more pipe cleaners to attach the little creatures to the mobile. It wasn’t very Christmassy but it was really effective.

Red Christmas tree monster:

This started off as a red Christmas tree because he couldn’t find three green pom poms but soon mutated into a monster. Like the Christmas trees he stuck three pom poms onto each other, large at the bottom, then medium and then a small sparkly red pom pom on the top. He used the lolly stick as a base for the moster, stuck on the yellow foam holly leaves as wings and then stuck on two goggly eyes, one green and one red, and just to make it more monster-esque, one eye is below the other rather than them being next to each other. He also used a pipe cleaner as a sort of belt for the monster.

Spiral pet:

This was again incredibly simple but very cute, if not very festive. One of the girls twisted a fluffy red and green striped pipe cleaner into a flat spiral (so that it was two dimensional and didn’t go up into a cone shape. She then just simply stuck two goggly eyes into it – again one red and one green to match the stripes I assume.

Red spider/octopus:

One of the girls made this by just sticking two red pom poms together, one slightly larger than the other, and then twisting a red fluffy pipe cleaner and a green fluffy pipe cleaner around its body (the slightly larger pom pom) as legs. She then stuck the googly eyes onto it, again one red and one green.

Pipe cleaner reindeer:

This is a little pipe cleaner reindeer. I unfortunately thought it was a dog which she fortunately took in good grace! She twisted the body shape out of a gold pipe cleaner. She actually cut it into three pieces to get the body and ears which were little folded loops and the the two sets of legs which were just bent into two sides of a triangle. She then stuck on a small sparkly red pom pom for the face and a tiny white pom pom for the tail. She then added on the goggly eyes.

Spiral decoration:

One of the boys made a set of these spiral decorations. He twisted two pipe cleaners of contrasting colour together, this was a much looser twist than those used for the candy canes. He then bent the result into a loose spiralling curl with a loop at the top for attaching string so that it can be hung up.

Eyes in the back of my head:

I unfortunately didn’t get a picture of this one but wished I had. One of the boys got a black pipe cleaner and then pom poms of varying sizes in white and red and cut holes through them so that he could thread them like beads onto the pipe cleaner. He managed all but the very smallest pom pom with the safety children’s scissors, the last one had to be done very carefully with the small scissors on my pen knife. He then positioned them along the pipe cleaner, the ends of which he bent so that they would loop over his ears like glasses. He then stuck a goggly eye on each pom pom and put it on so that the ‘eyeballs’ were staring out of the back of his head. It was so clever! I couldn’t stop laughing – again not very festive but a good laugh.